Abstract

Stimulated photon echoes (SPEs) with time duration comparable to the coherent lifetime and Rabi period have been investigated theoretically and experimentally with an angled beam configuration. The Rabi oscillation effects on both the transmitted field (optical nutation) and the SPE fields are explained by analytic solutions of Maxwell–Bloch equations. The theory also predicts that an echo can exist in the noncausal direction, and this was confirmed by experiments with Tm:YAG crystal.

Figures (3)

Calculated results of the induced fields from a quasi-continuous plane-wave probe in an optically thin spatial–spectral grating with w0<0, Ω0=0.8MHz, and τ21=0.3µs. Top trace, optical nutation on the normalized transmitted field. E-t and E+t are the normalized echo fields in the causal and noncausal directions, calculated from Eqs. (6) and (7), respectively.